


Escape Artist

by remembertowrite



Series: Tumblr Prompts [6]
Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Gen, Hiding, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Paranoia, Running Away, Stalking, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-06-02 23:39:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6587842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remembertowrite/pseuds/remembertowrite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twelve times Charlie Strand ran away, and one time she didn't. Based on a Tumblr prompt: "I'm in this for life."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Escape Artist

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a prompt from [E_Salvatore](http://archiveofourown.org/users/E_Salvatore): "[I'm in this for life.](http://surely-you-jess.tumblr.com/post/142989353258/prompt-16-im-in-this-for-life)"

Charlie Strand lived the life of an escape artist. First, from the attentions of her birth mother, who had wanted to reconnect after a dozen years disappeared. Then, from the unfeeling stoicism of her father as he searched the California countryside, denying the incontestable facts of what they’d witnessed and convincing himself that her mother had stowed away in some cruddy motel down the highway. After that, from the oppression of well-intentioned grandparents who only saw their dead daughter every time they looked at her.

But she could never get away from the ghost of her dead mother.

###

> January 2000

The first message came two weeks into Charlie’s second semester of college. It was a simple 3- by 5-inch post card she found in her campus mailbox, a glossy landscape of the Rockies in the summertime, the reddish-brown mountains giving way to green valleys below; and on the back, the wide, looping cursive that might’ve been affectionate, if not for the ominous message splattered in blue pen.

_I’m always looking out for you, Charlie._

It didn’t have a return address, but she recognized the sick forgery of handwriting that had wished her well, scrawled on little pink post-it notes wrapped lovingly into her grade school lunchbox.

She eventually filed a police report with campus security, but nothing came of it.

As the weeks wore on and papers from her classes further cluttered her desk, the post card disappeared into the back of her files, lost somewhere near the copy of her father’s second book; and so Charlie Strand buried the only piece of her dead mother her father hadn’t already destroyed.

###

> August 2003

The second message ended up in Charlie’s mailbox a few months after she’d graduated school and promptly moved across the country to New York. The red ink of postal confusion almost covered the entire face of the stubby pink envelope, a smattering of “return to sender failed” and “routed through Chicago” and “new forwarding address.” The ink had even leaked through the envelope onto the face of the greeting card; it screamed its congratulations to her in rainbow glitter, and the little note on the inside under “Class of 2003” inspired pinpricks of terror down her spine.

 _I’m so proud of you, Charlie_ , the card told her, the little curlicue of the y’s a perfect mimicry of her ghostly mother’s cursive.

Charlie rushed into her tiny apartment and pulled the chain lock tight. She collapsed against the door and slid down to the floor, tears of frustration causing her mascara to run, creating little streaks of black down the sides of her eyes.

She tore apart the disgusting pink of the envelope, coating her floor in celebratory confetti, but couldn’t bring herself to destroy the glitter bomb of a greeting card.

The next week, as Charlie packed her things into tubs for a move, she tucked the card into a box between a desk lamp and a stapler. It was a hideous tombstone, but Charlie would make it work.

###

> December 2006

The third message wound up in the inbox of her grad school email account, the subject a simple “Hello” sitting there quietly from an unknown sender, nestled in between an assignment from a professor and yet another message from melissa@strandinstitute.com that she promptly deleted.

Sipping hot chamomile tea and looking forward to her first holiday season in London, Charlie clicked through her emails with a lazy contentment. She opened the “Hello” email, and the hairs on the back of her neck rose.

_I’m so happy to see you doing so well. Jack seems like a nice young man._

Her fingers trembled uncontrollably, a dance of electric fear she hadn’t performed in three years. She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until Jack’s soothing hands found her back, rubbing comforting circles into her shoulders.

“Char, you okay? What is it?”

She clicked quickly to the next email from the professor, poorly masking the paranoid feeling of being watched.

“Some assignment Professor Doyle sent.” She turned back and flashed him a smile. “I’m fine. I’m almost done.”

Jack left her alone that night, but as more anonymous emails came through her inbox, Charlie started avoiding him. Messages remarked on how excellent Jack was at tennis, or how charming he looked in his blue pea coat. Charlie stayed holed up in her apartment, trying to avoid using her computer, until she found _the_ email.

_I hope I can see you soon, darling. I can’t wait to meet Jack’s family in Radlett on Christmas Eve._

She sent emails wishing her professors a good holiday and offering an apology that she’d dropped out of school so suddenly. She packed a duffel bag with a week’s worth of clothes and meant to leave everything else behind.

Her hand lingered on her doorknob as she stared back at the laptop, screenshots of the stalker’s emails saved to a folder on the desktop.

She took it with her against her better judgment, cradling the device full of fake motherly messages the whole cab ride to Heathrow.

###

> February 2008

The ninth message arrived in a nondescript envelope to the house’s shared mailbox, a standard muted white adorned with a Valentine’s themed stamp. She found it wedged in between a bill from the electric company and an imposing envelope marked with the masthead of the very official-sounding Deva Corp.

Charlie closed the mailbox and stomped across the front yard in her snow boots, shivering in the Michigan cold. (It was hard to be found in a small town in Michigan.)

She kicked off her boots as she entered the front door, ignoring her two roommates watching television in the living room, and shuffled her frozen body into the kitchen. She dumped the electric bill on the counter and thumbed the envelope with no return sender.

It was a short handwritten letter on a sheet of notebook paper. The letters looked scrawled and cramped, the loops less big and graceful, as if the sender had jotted it down in a rush.

_I’m sorry I scared you last time. I want to see you, but I can’t right now. At least I’ve found you again. Thinking of you always._

She crumpled up the envelope, but stuffed the faded notebook paper into her purse.

Charlie decided then and there to become a world traveler.

Hiding was easier if she was constantly moving.

> ###
> 
> June 2015

The tenth, eleventh, and twelfth messages popped up on her phone in the Facebook Messenger app while she sipped a cappuccino in a cafe down the street from her apartment in Monterotondo, forty minutes outside the center of Rome. The messages were from a user named Lisa G, whose profile picture was a golden retriever. A very cute golden retriever, but it felt incongruent with the cryptic nonsense the sketchy Lisa had sent her.

_Did you know your father is the star of his very own podcast?_

_theblacktapespodcast.com_

_Darling, don’t believe everything you hear about your dead mother._

Charlie shifted in her chair in discomfort. She supposed she’d have to break the lease on her apartment in Reno.

Five podcast episodes and three hours of mounting ire later, Charlie dialed a phone number with a Seattle area code.

“Hello, this is a message for Alex Reagan. I understand that you feel you need to drag my father into the spotlight to increase your ratings or whatever, but I’d like you to stop talking about me and my mother. Kay? Goodbye.”

###

> October 2015

The thirteenth message was delivered in person as Charlie gathered up the last of her things in her Reno apartment.

She couldn’t believe her eyes: the brown hair, the quiet smile, the soft hands. Her father would’ve pitied her, now cursed to see the ghost of her dead mother in such a corporeal form.

“Charlie, darling, people are looking for you. You have to come with me now.”

The apparition embraced Charlie, and it felt so real. The bitter formation of tears stung the back of her eyes.

“God, Mom, you look so alive.”

The ghost smiled at her.

“I _am_ , Charlie. I’m in this for life.”

Charlie smiled back, and against the better judgment of her father's voice berating her in her head, she believed.


End file.
